"After school was out I went to Fairbanks with Jennifer and Steven to work on our house. After working on my house I took off with a friend for a three day walk on the back side of Denali Park. Then after working some more on the house, another friend and I left on a six week trip in South America. While down there we traveled through three countries, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. In Ecuador I visited a lot of my old friends in a city called Cuenca where I lived 20 years ago for four years. After that we went down through Peru and visited the Inca ruins at Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Then we headed to Bolivia by train where we stopped at my old Peace Corps village, Tiquina, located on Lake Titicaca. There I visited for three days with old friends whom I hadn't seen in 21 years. From Tiquina we traveled down to the Bolivian jungle for two weeks. There we took a 50 kilometer walk from one Indian village to another across the foothills of the Andean Mountains through some beautiful, original tropical forest. Some of the trees there were as thick as my classroom. The parrots, toucans, and trogons we saw had spectacularly colored feathers, and we saw three different species of monkeys. For about a week we worked with two different environmental groups that were trying to save what's left of the tropical forest. Then we rode for two days down a tributary of the upper Amazon River in a long 40 foot dugout canoe. After that we flew back up to La Paz for a few days before returning to Ecuador where we spent another week in the Ecuadorian jungle. Then we took the jet back to Alaska. After working hard at the house in Fairbanks with Jen and Steven we all came back out to Marshall."

By: Frank Keim

Interviewed by: Matthew Shorty